Category Archives: Uncategorized

Through my research and subsequent discoveries I realized a few things.

First, it is very difficult to track food.

You have to research every step a food item (or its ingredients) has taken. There is no map that says: here’s how bread is made, where it tells the path of all the ingredients (or else I didn’t find one). There are no labels on packages that declare where the ingredients are from. The company websites certainly don’t tell you. At best, you can only trace the food to the closest warehouse.

Even if this information was given, it wouldn’t help people realise the amount of fossil fuel that went into their food.

I myself did not realise how much fuel was used. I didn’t know how processed my food was; even my fruit was sent to a plant. I also did not realise how much fuel went into the whole  process. The fertilizers use fuel, the tractors use fuel and the mining (to get the metals for the the machines in the process) and drilling processes (to get the fuel for the machines) depend on fuel, transport uses fuel etc. Basically, every step of food production depends on fuel.

Therefore, every step damages our world. Higher global temperatures, dead zones, dust storms, famines, droughts, are all the results of our agricultural system. As since our agricultural system depends on fuel, it is the fuel that is the underlying cause of the problems.

Furthermore, I realised that much of my food was grown in third-world countries. Therefore, I was eating food that could have gone to much better use in the countries where they were from.

These realizations reminded me of George Kennan’s quote in Manning’s article. He stated, in reference to the United States role as the world’s superpower, that “[we] need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.”

While it seems like companies and perhaps governments accept this statement, individuals do not. We are still deceived. As company websites and food packages do not declare where our food is from and it is nearly impossible to trace, it is very difficult for us to figure out that something is wrong.

When I pause to think about the food system, like I was able to do in this blog, I realise that something must be done. I’m sure that if other people were to study our food system they would also realise that our entire system needs to change. We need to have a food system that can afford altruism and world benefaction. However, this system must be functional in a 21^st century world.

While I do not know what I new system would look like, I know that large number of people are now asking for change. I hope that, in the future, I can learn about this new food system and be satisfied in terms of fuel input and world-consideration.

The last step I examined was transportation.

I realized that the food I ate was transported across continents and therefore this process would require enormous inputs of fuel.

The first thing I researched was where my food actually originated from. This is what I came up with: As you can see, I eat a “global” diet. An article in the Guardian explained that while some my menu items are  transported across the world using planes,  responsible for 2% of the global carbon emissions per year, most of my food is probably transported on ships, which are responsible for around 4% of global carbon emissions. (9)

In addition, the article mentioned the emissions from ships do not come under the Kyoto accord (9). These ships are responsible for 90% of the world’s trade and BP’s fleet alone uses 200 million tonnes of fuel each year (9). Imagine then, how much fuel must be used to by all the ships in the world…

Talk about the cost of transport.

Anyways, this is the breakdown of all my food items, where they came from and how they came to me. I should mention that I walked to pick them up from the store. All my food items came from Safeway or Top Ten (a local fruit/veggie store). They’re both about a ten minute walk from my house.

I then looked at packaging.

Packaging is again done by machines which require fuel. Furthermore, enormous amounts of fuel goes into packages because their primary ingredient is plastic (which is oil).

This plastic is mainly wasted (or so I’ve heard). It is non-biodegradable and ends up in landfills, the oceans, animal’s stomachs etc.

I then traced the production process down the line and came to food processing. I found that nearly all our food is processed using machines that gobble up fuel. Even the apples, which I showed a video of beforehand, are processed by machines.

I didn’t recognize this beforehand. I still had the idealistic image of families devoting their lives to picking, sorting and washing apples in my mind.I realize this was naive of me, however, it goes to show how effective advertising can be.

Other things, like milk and grains, I did realize were processed.

Here’s a video showing some of the machines used for processing milk. The rapid heating and cooling of the milk, the separating and the pumping through various tubes at various rates would all use vast amounts of energy.

The milk is only the beginning. Here’s a breakdown of my results for my other food choices.

When I began to examine the food that I ate I followed the food chain, like Manning suggested, back to the plants that were the basic ingredients in my food.

I realized, from Manning’s article, that the  energy that it took to mine the metals that made the farm equipment and the fuel the equipment used, were significant. However, these fuel costs were hard to trace, as they depended on the lifetime of the tractor and it’s type.

Therefore, I mainly concentrated on the fertilizers, pesticides and other primary fuel inputs that went into my food.

Here’s a breakdown of what I discovered:

As you can see, all of the food that I consumed used pesticides and fertilizers. Therefore, everything that the food consumed during my 24-hour period were all small contributors to the huge environmental issues of today.

Manning discusses issues like acid rain, global warming, and the “dead zones” in the earth’s waters being the results of nitrogen runoff from fertilizer. I know that pesticides release equally harmful chemicals into our environment.

It disturbed me greatly to trace every food item back to its ingredients and find out that, in every way, my food choices are contributing to the very issues that I wish to combat.

The elusive taste of peanut butter and soy sauce

By dinner I was craving Thai food. Using allrecipes.com I found a recipe that befitted the ingredients in my cupboard. I adjusted the recipe for two servings and took out the ingredients that I didn’t have.

Here’s a copy of the recipe I used:

Thai noodle salad (1)

–          1 package Udon noodles

–          2 tablespoons and 3/4 teaspoon unsalted crunchy peanut butter

–          2 tablespoons and 3/4 teaspoon milk

–          1/4 teaspoon grated fresh ginger

–          1/4 clove garlic, minced

–          2-1/2 teaspoons rice wine vinegar

–          2-1/2 teaspoons soy sauce

–          3/4 teaspoon dark sesame oil

–          1/8 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes

–          1/4 cucumber, julienned

–          5/8 carrots, grated

–          1 tablespoon and 1/2 teaspoon chopped fresh mint

–          1/4 head romaine lettuce

–          1/4 cup and 2 teaspoons chopped peanuts

1. In a large pot of lightly salted boiling water, cook the udon noodles for about five minutes or until tender. Drain and rinse the noodles under cold running water and let cool.
2. Whisk the peanut butter, milk, ginger, garlic, vinegar, soy sauce, sesame oil, and red pepper flakes in a small bowl until well blended.
3. In a large salad bowl, combine the cooked noodles, cucumber, sprouts, carrot, green onions and mint. Wisk the peanut butter dressing and pour it over the salad. Stir until well coated and serve chilled on a bed of romaine leaves. Garnish with the roasted and chopped peanuts.

This dinner was absolutely delicious. I  recommend  this recipe if you’re craving Thai.

For a snack at around 2:30 I ate one of my favourite apples: an ambrosia apple.

This fall, I challenged myself to an apple tasting competition using the apple varieties from my local stores: Safeway, Top Ten and No Frills. The overall winner based on taste, firmness and skin was the ambrosia apple.

Here’s a video that highlights this delicious fruit.

At around 11:30 I began preparing my lunch. Today I prepared one of my traditional lunches: an egg, sunny side up, on toast.

The egg was of the extra-large variety from Lucerne, the bread was from Cobs. I also added mayonnaise, paprika and red pepper flakes to my egg sandwich.

Unfortunately, there was no way to make my backpack-squished Cobs bread look appealing in sandwich form.

So, here is a picture of the egg frying instead. It looks delicious!

A traditional breakfast for me is a bowl of cereal. Today I poured a bowl of General Mills Oatmeal Crisp Almond cereal into a bowl. I added about ½ a cup of Lucerne 2% milk. I then let the whole creation sit for about 50 seconds (this was done in order to ensure that the oat flakes were the correct crunchiness as they are naturally too crunchy for me).

While I waited I prepared my Melitta Costa Rican Tarrazu fair-trade coffee that I had brewed around 9:00. To my coffee I added a bit of Lucerne 2% milk and approximately two teaspoons of Rogers white sugar.

At about 9:16 I sat down to my bowl of cereal and my cup of coffee.

It was highly enjoyable.

According to Richard Manning’s article entitled “The oil we eat” everything that we consume has a price. While this price may seem to be somewhat small monetarily, as we are a society that craves cheap, convenient food, this price is simply enormous in terms of fossil fuel. It takes an enormous amount of fossil fuel to produce the food that we eat.

Basically the article is explaining that we should dispense of the myth of this food chain

and realize that this food chain is much more accurate.

Therefore, we’re basically eating oil.

In order to examine this concept more thoroughly in History 106, we were told to blog about our food consumption for a 24 hour period. We would then reflect upon the amount of fossil fuel that was necessary for its production.

I tried to consume my “average meals” during the 24-hour period. Also, in order to properly reflect upon how fossil fuels contributed to the production of my food, I divided the process into the following four categories: